Magic
Trick
Your
memory
Can’t
be forgotten…
Those
eyes
Will always be
Remembered…
And
my feelings
Will
never
Die.
Montalvo
has this thing—he thinks that any reader who sees a poem of a page and a half,
with lines of ten or twelve syllables, will immediately have a mind freeze—too
long, too complicated, too much work. So, his strategy? Short poems, short
lines: get in, get to the point, get out.
“It sounds
almost like a haiku,”
said Mary Anne, a painter and professor, who had joined us for coffee, and had
just heard one of Montalvo’s poems. So then it’s time to point out that even in
a severely restricted form, a poem can have depth, can provoke thought.
Challenged, I came up with the only example I could:
The wren
Earns his living
Noiselessly.
His
response?
“What’s a
wren?”
It’s both
the best thing and the hardest thing of working with him—because so much of
what I assume everyone will know? Well, people don’t.
“No
pierda,” I tell him.
We’re going over one of his poems.
“Hunh?”
“I really
think you mean ‘no pierda’ instead of ‘no pierde.’”
Well, he’s
unconvinced, and why shouldn’t he be? I learned Spanish, after all, in my 30’s.
So he does what any kid would do: ask his buddy Carly. I wait for him to come
back with the answer.
“It turns
out that both are correct, but that I probably mean ‘no pierda,’” he reports.
“So what
did they tell you?”
It was, I’m
sorry to say, the usual half-baked explanation: better than “because it kinda
sounds better,” but not by much.
“Has
anybody told you about the subjunctive?”
“Sub—what?”
So we did
the subjunctive: first in Spanish, then in English. That’s when he tells me the
words that are daggers to the heart.
“It’s
totally cool that you’re teaching me stuff, ‘cause that’s what parents do.
Nobody’s taught me anything since I was sixteen. My mom taught me how to do
laundry. And now I hate doing laundry….”
16 to 21,
his current age: five years.
And what
have I taught him? Well, there’s the simple stuff—when to use “your” versus
“you’re.” Yes, because this boy, a product of the State of Florida Department
of Education? He slid through 12 years of English classes without learning what
a contraction
was.
Or there
was the Saxon
genitive—which most people simply call “apostrophes,” but if you can call
it the Saxon genitive, well, why not? Right, so I stepped back in the classroom
and did a little drilling:
“The house
of Montalvo?”
“Montalvo’s
house!”
And
speaking of the Saxons, what did he say when I told him that—generally
speaking—words of Anglo-Saxon origin tended to have more force than words
derived from Latin?
“Marc?”
Well, then
it was time to get down to some good examples:
“Defecation,”
I tell him.
“Ummm,
Latin?”
“Shit,” I
say.
“Anglo-Saxon!”
“Intercourse,”
I say.
He’s so
excited, he virtually shouts out that four-letter word, and then goes off to
give the news to Carly: “hey, you know where words like ‘shit’ and ‘fuck’ come
from?”
He’s
bright, you see—he catches on quickly. He’s had everything but a structure
(which is why I watched, and attached, the video below). Last week he wrote a villanelle. This week, it’s a sonnet.
Who knows
where this is ending up?
